The Hough transform is a technique commonly used in artificial vision for the detection of multi-dimensional features in images. This paper presents different applications of the Hough transform in the field of spectral data reduction. This transform enables in particular to develop auto-adaptive, robust algorithms for the detection of echelle orders and the wavelength calibration of spectra. These algorithms are part of the ESO-MIDAS spectroscopy packages and are used for pipeline calibration of spectra.